*Siniavskii, Andrei

Siniavskii, Andrei

Russian, 1925–1997
The essay played a vital role in the career of Andrei Siniavskii in each of his identities—that of a scholar, writing academic pieces under his own name, and as a belletrist, employing the pseudonym Abram Tertz. The latter pieces, in particular, are intimately connected with his fiction, providing insights about both the technique and the thematic concerns that predominate in his prose.
The critical pieces Siniavskii produced under his own name prior to his 1965 arrest lack the stylistic inventiveness of his stories, but they already reveal him as a probing and sensitive critic, most notably in the long introduction he wrote for a major 1965 collection of Boris Pasternak’s poetry. Siniavskii’s sensitivity to Pasternak’s use of language, as evidenced by his incisive comments on the stylistic and tonal aspects of the poetry, as well as his emphasis on Pasternak’s imagery and philosophical concerns, can,
in retrospect, be seen as signaling his own interests as a writer. Perhaps surprisingly, much of his early writing was on a stalwart of socialist realism, Maksim Gor’kii, whose final, unfinished novel was the subject of his dissertation, part of which appeared as “O khudozhestvennoi strukture romana Zhizn’ Klima Samgina” (1958; On the artistic structure of The Life of Klim Samgin).
Siniavskii’s political sympathies during the early 1960s show up more clearly in the attitude he displays to the then current literature. Thus, besides his enthusiastic piece on Pasternak, he offers a warm appreciation of Anna Akhmatova’s more recent poetry on the occasion of her 75th birthday (“Raskovannyi golos” [1964; “The Unfettered Voice”]).
Conversely, when writing on those who strongly supported the repressive aspects of Soviet literary life, he could be merciless. “O novom sbornike Anatoliia Sofronova” (1959; “On a Collection of Verses by Anatoly Sofronov”) concludes with an excerpt from Vladimir Maiakovskii’s original and powerful poetry of the 1920s to highlight the imitative and pallid nature of Sofronov’s verse.
One of the earliest works to be signed Abram Tertz is the programmatic essay “Chto takoe sotsialisticheskii realizm” (1959; On Socialist Realism). Here his lively and witty manner partly masks a very serious purpose: to undermine the dogma that had by then ruled Soviet literature for a quarter of a century. In part he objects to the deadening effect of the realistic manner that was imposed on Soviet writers so that their works would be accessible to the masses, but more broadly he points to logical inconsistencies in the very terminology: why should “realism” necessarily be “socialist”? In fact, he goes on to point out that Marxism (and, by extension, communism) is not unlike a religious movement in its efforts to direct belief, and that by trying to make writing portray a future ideal society its advocates are calling for something that is closer to Romanticism than realism.
Further, by forcing writers into a mode that is not of their own making, socialist realism results in simplistic, static, and ultimately uninteresting literature.
Mysli vrasplokh (1965; Unguarded Thoughts), also by “Abram Tertz” in the pre-arrest period, at first resembles a seemingly random collection of ideas and aphorisms, but upon closer inspection turns out to focus on a handful of themes—most notably, the nature of sexuality, which is not treated positively, and belief in God, which is. The work is thus important for treating two topics of concern to Siniavskii/Tertz elsewhere as well, while in both form and content it also signals his interest in the turn-of-the-century philosopher Vasilii Rozanov, later the subject of Siniavskii’s study, “Opavshie list’ia” V.V.Rozanova (1982; Rozanov’s “Fallen Leaves”). Furthermore, the fragmentary structure serves as a precursor of Golos iz khora (1973; A Voice from the Chorus), a much longer work constructed from the material in letters that Siniavskii sent to his wife while in prison. Voice, seen by some critics as a kind of autobiography, contains material
based on his prison experience along with his views on literature, the nature of art, and a host of other themes. Siniavskii thus develops what might be termed an “anti-narrative” essay, which freely mingles a variety of forms and jumps seemingly arbitrarily from topic to topic; it requires the reader’s active participation to derive the broader themes and a sense of coherence.
Two other essays published after his emigration to France in 1973, and under the name Abram Tertz, have proved to be Siniavskii’s most controversial: Progulki s Pushkinym (1975; Strolls with Pushkin) and V teni Gogolia (1975; In Gogol’s shadow). The former in particular led to sharp protests by émigré figures in the West when it was first published, and then by Soviet critics when it finally appeared in the Soviet Union during
the period of glasnost. Siniavskii’s detractors were disturbed by his iconoclastic treatment of Russia’s greatest writer; what they seemed to miss, or refused to accept, is that a“demythologizing” of Pushkin was precisely the point of the essay: only in this way could Siniavskii discover the essence of Pushkin’s true significance for subsequent literature (and for himself).
The remainder of Siniavskii’s work from his period abroad can be roughly divided into two categories: 1) sociopolitical commentary on the Soviet Union and on current developments in Russian political and intellectual life, and 2) a renewal of his earlier career as literary critic. The latter includes, besides his essay on Rozanov, articles on a wide range of figures in 20th-century Russian literature: Zoshchenko, Remizov, and, once again, Gor’kii, who is now, understandably, treated less reverently than before (cf. “Roman M.Gor’kogo Mat’ kak rannii obrazets sotsialisticheskogo realizma” [1988; Gor’kii’s novel Mother as an early model of socialist realism]). The first group opens with his “Literaturnyi protsess v Rossii” (1974; “The Literary Process in Russia”), in which he notes that the Soviet state’s very efforts to control writers had the perverse effect of heightening their influence, often against the state’s interests. He has also written about his own experiences as a dissident and about the resurgence of Russian nationalism; several essays in which he attempts to define the essential features of Bolshevism form the basis of his book Soviet Civilization (1990), to date published only in translation.
While on the surface Siniavskii had two identities as an essayist—the relatively straightforward commentary that he signed under his own name and the more literary type of essay that appeared under the pseudonym Abram Tertz—his concerns were similar in both guises: to examine the ideals and strivings of the artist, to explore issues of freedom and oppression, and to understand the nature of the creative urge.